What else can you do?

W

wants 3 red lights

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I have a Tungsten T5 and I was wondering if anyone here knows if it is possible to line in another portable device to the T5 like an ipod or some other mass storage device, and use it as a sorta portable, mini hard drive for the palm pilot....?

Can it be done? What would I need?

I've looked everywhere on the internet for other people's ideas... but haven't found anything.
 
I don't think this would be possible without some major surgery. First, you'd need something like an RS232 socket to connect an external device. I suppose that someone clever could come up with a way to do this with the mini USB connector but you'd need some sort of translator in-line between two different devices for data exchange.

Second, you have to be able to write an interface between the virtual file system and the other device since that's what would be needed to needed to access a hard drive on another device and transfer files. I'm not sure Palm even really understands the virtual file systems specs at this point so I imagine a third party developer would have a really difficult time with this.

Finally, would there really be a market for something like this? I know the IPod comes with up to a 60 gb hard drive but the number of Palm users that need that type of storage is very small. Even a 2 gb SD card provides way more storage than probably 99% of Palm users would ever need. I'm pretty sure you also take pretty significant hit on speed loading applications, a major complaint about the Life Drive now.

I'm not saying this isn't possible to do but I doubt it's commercially viable.
 
There is nothing like it available for Palm OS or Pocket PC devices. However, if you want a PDA with this kind of a function, you might want to look at some of the Linux devices such as the Archos PMA400. This particular device does not have SD or CF slots. However, it has 2 USB connectors, including 1 USB 1.1 and 1 USB 2.0. There is a 30GB hard drive built in and it can run Qtopia Linux applications including the K Desktop apps. The product web site claims cameras can connect to the ports.

Who knows, maybe future Palm devices will add the feature when the new Palm Linux is released.
 
On the Pocket PC side, a few models have USB host ports (Toshiba has a couple) where you can plug in an external USB hard drive and it will work.

For other Pocket PC's that have a CF card slot - there is the RATOC card to provide USB host capability. http://www.ratocsystems.com/english/products/subpages/cfu1u.html

On the Palm side, I'm not aware of any current option that can provide this.

I've also gotten external SCSI devices to work using an Adaptec PC Card in an expansion sleeve of the older iPAQs, however, there's nothing now that can do the same thing. That was cool in it's day - I successfully used Iomega Zip and Jaz drives, an external Sony SCSI drive, as well as several external SCSI hard drives - ah - those were the days.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled forum.
 
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